They’re diluting the whole brand, letting people like that sit up here.” The words landed like a blow, and I looked at my wife — the layers of foundation, the desperate hunger for validation — and felt, for the first time, a clean and total hatred.

Her shallowness was not a quirk.

It was a disease, and I had caught it from her, and I had let it into my children’s lives.

But even as the hatred rose, an honest voice under it corrected me, because I had learned, that afternoon, to stop lying to myself, and the honest voice said: you have no right to hate her for this. Delphine was exactly what she had always been.

She had never pretended, to me or to anyone, to be more than a woman who valued status and money and appearances, and I had married her precisely because those values matched my own so conveniently.